RADIO CHOICE

FRANCIS GALTON coined the phrase ‘nature versus nurture’, believing that characteristics, including a capacity for hard work, were inherited. Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, devoted much of his life to eugenics — a term that he also coined — which means ‘well born’. He proposed that people with supposedly superior characteristics should be encouraged to marry into similarly ‘gifted’ families. In DID THE VICTORIANS RUIN THE WORLD? (RADIO 4, 9.30AM), Kat and Helen Arney consider the work of a Victorian thinker whose ideas were taken up with cruel enthusiasm by the Nazis.

THE Gwent Levels are wetlands and mudflats, teeming with wildlife, that lie north of the Severn Estuary. Humans have drained and enclosed these

lands since Mesolithic times; sometimes, the sea surges in and takes them back. Helen Mark visits this marginal place of waders, wildfowl, damselflies and lapwings in OPEN COUNTRY (RADIO 4, 3PM), and hears how an everencroaching transport system is now a greater threat than the sea.

PLUM HOUSE, home of the 18th-century poet George Pudding, is braced for trouble. A visit from the Women’s Institute looms. Miles Jupp (pictured) stars in the oddball comedy PLUM HOUSE (RADIO 4, 6.30PM).